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Social media is essentially like talking to someone, just through your respective computers, iPhones, smart devices or other electronic or digital tool. DIA’s social media strategy is to exchange knowledge by sharing important content, to raise awareness of our educational programs that facilitate this knowledge exchange, and to engage with the public (and our stakeholders) across whatever media they may use. I think of social media as an extension of a face-to-face conversation.

WHAT DIA DOES

DIA’s three main social media platforms, and the three that most companies use for social media, are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Our most popular form

of social media is by far LinkedIn because people come to DIA for professional advice, for ways to grow their career and make other professional connections, so that’s where we tend to do our most work.

We have the main DIA LinkedIn group with more than 33,000 members and subgroups for clinical research, clinical safety and pharmacovigilance, medical communications, regulatory affairs and so on, which are very similar to the DIA ConneX member communities. LinkedIn classifies our group as one of their most active based on the number of comments and articles that people post.

A lot of people follow DIA on Twitter. The European Medicines

BRANDON KING

Market ing Specia l is t , DIA Amer icas

Social Media @ DIA

Social media in action: DIA 2014 50th Annual Meeting attendees signed this logo, took their picture with it and then posted their self-portraits online.

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with people on a level they find interesting and those people begin to look to your company as a source of information.

Graphics and images pull in a lot more interaction; you can include text in images without using up character space. If you start a Twitter page, you also need images, which you should produce yourself. Try to avoid generic images; a branded image directly related to a topic makes more sense to your viewer. Don’t forget a YouTube page to host videos that your Twitter page can link to. You also need a company Google+ content page because of the way the Google search algorithm works: If you search for a company through Google, it will generally pull their Google+ page first.

Maintain a specific writer’s voice. Consistently write and present certain things –from meeting titles to abstract concepts – in the same specific way.

If you’re trying to get people to follow you, follow them. If you’re putting content out, and people are following you but you don’t really care what they say, eventually they won’t enjoy it. Don’t just put a message out and then forget about it – monitor it, and if it starts an online conversation, engage with that. It’s not just set it and forget it.

We are sometimes asked how we figure out how to say what we want to say in 140 characters. I have an English degree and my minor was in poetry. For me, finding those 140 characters is like writing a very short poem or haiku. You can turn Facebook into a novel but I try to act like Ezra Pound when I’m on Twitter – very

In this case, we put up the same image we consistently used – “Our mission hasn’t changed. Our look has.” – to announce that our brand has changed. We changed the DIA logo on our Twitter feed, we added a link to information about the new branding, and from there we pretty quickly picked up retweets. About ten minutes after that Twitter post, we posted the same thing on Facebook, and from there posted to LinkedIn.

WHERE TO BEGIN?

Ride the coattails of social media trends. Say you have a meeting coming up on oncology. Keep your ear to the ground to see if there’s an oncology conference, current news about a research breakthrough, or a big hashtag following on this topic. A lot of companies will post something that plays into these hashtags, and all of a sudden get visibility outside of their usual network.

At the same time, check before you tweet to a hashtag. You have to be careful. Sometimes people post something that was not at all what they intended and it ends up creating a backlash. It’s almost too easy to send stuff out and once it’s out there, you can’t take it back.

Place interesting content. I try to adhere to this rule: Three pieces of interesting, informative content that is not promotional for every one piece of promotional content. If all you do on your social media is say buy this and buy that, people will eventually not care because all you want to do is sell something. But if you post an interesting article and someone reads it and then asks a friend if they’ve read it, you’re engaging

Agency, for example, retweets a lot of what we post, and Jamie Heywood, our DIA 2014 50th Annual Meeting Keynote Speaker, retweeted a lot of our social media postings during our Annual Meeting this June.

We try to present a consistent message across all social platforms but then tweak it a little bit for each platform. A good illustration is the new branding that we rolled out on September 12: After we flipped the website over to the new branding, we determined the first place we’d see action would be Twitter, because Twitter is the platform where it’s easy for information to quickly spread. If we want to get information out quickly about a big change or a final deadline or “one last chance” for an important event, we tend to go to Twitter first. Then we wait to see if it gains any traction, and then we’ll look into other platforms.

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marketing will have to increase in the future. You might have 40,000 followers on Twitter but if they start a for-pay model and your message is only delivered to 5,000 of them, you’re going to have to pay to hit the same 40,000 that you used to get for free.

This will give rise to companies that you pay to manage your social media. A lot of people think that they’re experts in social media, but that’s like saying I’m an expert in publishing a magazine because I read ESPN magazine once a month. An agency will be able to properly organize everything that needs to go out. But the big thing is that it’s not going to be free much longer.

advertising, that’s what’s going to happen with social media. It will eventually be a for-pay model for the user as well: If you’re going to use Facebook and you don’t want to see ads, then you’ll have to pay an annual user fee. Companies will start to pull out of other advertising to go more fully into social media.

Facebook now does not post every post to every single person who follows you; they want you to pay for targeted advertising. Probably 40% of our followers see each post, even if we only post once a day. Twitter is apparently moving in that same direction, if you’re a company page. It seems more and more likely that marketing budgets for digital

short, succinct bits of information that build into your message.

I also think of it as a New York Times headline. Nine times out of ten, the way people look at Twitter is by flipping their thumb up to scan down the page on their mobile phone. You want to write something that makes them stop flipping through, which is the same thing the New York Times wants: You walk past a newsstand, your eye catches a headline, and your mind asks, “What was that?”

FUTURE STATE

If you look at the amount of money that Facebook and Google are now making through

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THESE TOPICS,

PLEASE VISIT:

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/patient1/

https://www.facebook.com/PatientNumber1

http://www.myhealthteams.com/

http://www.myhealthteams.com/blog/

http://csdd.tufts.edu/

http://csdd.tufts.edu/research

https://www.ciscrp.org/

https://www.ciscrp.org/education-center/

https:// www.ciscrp.org/programs-events /educational-tools/

http://tirs.sagepub.com

DIA 2014 50th Annual Meeting Keynote Speaker Jamie Heywood shares data from the PatientsLikeMe social network.